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A Different Kind of Dystopian Novel

Charles A. Lindbergh speaking at a 1941 rally of the isolationist “America First” movement at the Manhattan Center.Credit
Bettmann/Getty Images

“On the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters.”

Yes, last November. I remember. But the line above is taken from Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004), a novel in which the aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh, after being elected president in 1940 over Franklin D. Roosevelt, keeps the United States out of World War II and not-so-subtly threatens American Jews while cozying up to the Third Reich.

Returning to the novel at this moment, when panic reading is all the rage, offers a perspective different from that of many apocalyptic best sellers, new and old.

Contemporary dystopian fiction has been surging in popularity for several years, but the chaotic and confounding state of America in 2017 has sent readers scrambling back to the genre’s canonical texts: “1984,” “Brave New World,” “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Those books have plenty to say to anyone fearful of our political climate, and where it might be headed. But they are also fantastical, a blend of satire, science fiction and parable, the point of which is to change our view of reality by inflating it to surreality.

“The Plot Against America” more rightly belongs to the genre of alternative history, but even that shelf is not an easy fit for it. Books like Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” (in which the Axis powers prevailed in World War II) and Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” (in which the Confederacy won the Civil War) offer intricately and extensively changed bizarro universes.

Roth’s book, by contrast, is a work of deep realism, much of it the thinly veiled autobiographical story of a family in midcentury Newark, N.J. The brash counterfactual around which it’s built plays mostly as a bass note in an otherwise familiar Roth song.

In the novel, Lindbergh unites a fractured Republican Party, and runs for office on an isolationist platform, promising to keep America out of the war raging in Europe.

Photo

Philip RothCredit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

He keeps Roosevelt from a third term in a blowout election, carrying 46 states and winning 57 percent of the popular vote. The widespread antiwar sentiment in the country at the time is turned, in Roth’s version, into a winning hand.

But before embarking on further discussion of a novel about America that has a swastika on its cover, perhaps some caveats would be wise.

When “Plot” was published, Roth wrote an essay in The New York Times Book Review, in which he emphasized that his interest was in revisiting 1940-1942, not in commenting on George W. Bush’s America or any other version of the country. He wrote the book “not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past.”

After the election of Donald J. Trump, which even to many on the left made the George W. Bush presidency seem deeply traditional, even boring, Roth told The New Yorker in January: “Writers here don’t live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did.”

However much readers might crave it, no novel offers a neat parallel between its pages and the real world. Still, what parallels do exist in Roth’s novel are striking.

As today, when many urge President Trump to denounce attacks on synagogues and mosques, observers in “The Plot Against America” worry about those emboldened by “a provocateur cynically encouraging American citizens who needed in no way to feel besieged to cling to their oldest, most crippling anxieties.”

In the novel, synagogues have windows broken and walls defaced. One is firebombed. The government positions its policies as efforts at greater assimilation, with the Office of American Absorption drawing up programs like Homestead 42, in which Jews from places like Newark are sent to live and work in places like Kentucky. The goal is to weaken Jewish communities and “diminish whatever electoral strength” they might have.

Photo

Mr. Roth’s novel.

Characters — particularly the family’s father, Herman Roth, a firm supporter of Roosevelt — say things that could be lifted from today’s Twitter feeds. “How can this be happening in America?” Herman asks. “How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” And later: “The man is unfit. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be there, and it’s as simple as that!”

Lindbergh in the novel is clearly an outlier in political life. But in other ways, Roth perhaps rightfully saw 1940s America as a place where several conventional criteria would have to be met if highly unconventional ideas were to land in the White House. Lindbergh, with his “relative youth” and “graceful athleticism,” represents “normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice.” He’s even said to possess an “affable blandness.”

Lindbergh’s diplomatic relationship with Germany mirrors in some aspects the unusual dynamic involving Trump, his administration and Russia. Americans in the book, as they are now, are left to wonder about exactly why certain global relationships have warmed.

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Most striking just 13 years after it was published is Roth’s portrayal of organized opposition, which is limited and only rises in the communities most directly threatened by the new government.

Though there are protests in a dozen cities after the Iceland Understanding (a nonaggression pact signed by Lindbergh and Hitler), and Democrats condemn the president for “dealing with a murderous fascist tyrant as his equal,” widespread dissent does not develop. The White House becomes “accustomed to nearly universal deification of Lindbergh,” and even late in the book, he is supported by “a record 80 to 90 percent of every classification and category of voter, except the Jews.”

Perhaps because he creates a mostly unified electorate, Roth doesn’t write a political solution for the quandary he envisions. Lindbergh’s reign is resolved (brilliantly or cheaply or a bit of both, depending on your tolerance for clever plot twists) by something I can’t spoil — but it will raise eyebrows, especially of those who have speculated in recent weeks that the Russians might “have something” on Trump.

Roth didn’t have the first weeks of 2017 to draw on when devising a picture of what mass resistance to unprecedented political change in this country would have looked like. One might imagine him heartened.

A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2017, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Different Kind of Dystopian Novel. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe